Sunday Musings – September 18. 2022
Look Carefully
Hope
In the entrance of the Greenwood Reconciliation Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma is a monument entitled HOPE in front of a large cascading waterfall. Actually, HOPE is one side of this three-sided monument. Humiliation and Hostility are the other two sides. Hope, however, dominates as one faces the monument. Behind it one is comforted by a magnificent cascading waterfall.
There is also a center memorial. Surrounding it are ten plagues containing brief statements chronicling the long history of response to the oppression of Native Americans and Slaves who continued to show up to fight for the Union, to care for the families of slaveholders, to endure Jim Crow, to build a thriving economic and spiritual Greenwood community only to be slaughtered and burnt and then once again to stay to rebuild/reclaim.
The huge circular center monument depicts men (seems to be only males) fighting, clawing, and assisting each other on their climb to the top. They are depicted with guns, plows, and other symbols of the tools they used for survival; of the symbols of the tenacity of faith which embodies a strength which few of us can imagine.
Emily Dickinson famously wrote the poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, the first stanza of which is: Hope is the thing with feather that perches in the soul.”
One wonders of the strength which somehow continues to hold the weight of trauma in the very cells of the DNA of the oppressed. As a child I picked hard shelled black walnuts which contained meat hidden in tunnels or veins which had to be patiently mined. When I think of hope in the midst of oppression; lynching, the sexual and soul raping of children and adults, the backbreaking toil until the motor of the body died, the discarding of the shell of the bodies which remained, the abject rejection of the kinship which the spirit gods ordained, I think of those walnuts which held on to their meat determined to only share it with those who were patient enough to extract it.
Hope is the thing with feathers. Feathers are seemingly wispy and yet, capable of shedding water and UV rays, providing warmth, permitting flight of amazing distance and becoming the quills which dictates the words which proclaim “We shall overcome. We shall thrive again. We will not be destroyed.” As does Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son feathers proclaim, “You can’t do nothin except kill me and that ain’t nothin.”
In recent years in the United States and other countries, the feathers of hope carry the courage and strength which is rebuilding Greenwood and other communities; the strong voices which will not be silence in the midst of bills forbidding the teaching of history; bills which ensures the comfort of privileged white boys and girls; the courage and strength which defies the excuses denying the need for reparations; the determination which refuses to be kept from the voting booths; the gift of ‘sight’ which often sees beneath the fear of loving; and the warm breeze which soars in the spite of the cold winds of hate,
One has to have courage and strength to see the feathers which protect the hope, Courage in the face of oppression, smiles in the face of hate, and love in the face of modern lynching. Look carefully. Greenwood Reconciliation Park is the heart where hope is held; the heart of the classroom where teachers respond to questions about history and sex, and where the realities of the fearful stand naked. Look carefully…
Written September 16, 2022
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
Look Carefully
Hope
In the entrance of the Greenwood Reconciliation Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma is a monument entitled HOPE in front of a large cascading waterfall. Actually, HOPE is one side of this three-sided monument. Humiliation and Hostility are the other two sides. Hope, however, dominates as one faces the monument. Behind it one is comforted by a magnificent cascading waterfall.
There is also a center memorial. Surrounding it are ten plagues containing brief statements chronicling the long history of response to the oppression of Native Americans and Slaves who continued to show up to fight for the Union, to care for the families of slaveholders, to endure Jim Crow, to build a thriving economic and spiritual Greenwood community only to be slaughtered and burnt and then once again to stay to rebuild/reclaim.
The huge circular center monument depicts men (seems to be only males) fighting, clawing, and assisting each other on their climb to the top. They are depicted with guns, plows, and other symbols of the tools they used for survival; of the symbols of the tenacity of faith which embodies a strength which few of us can imagine.
Emily Dickinson famously wrote the poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers”, the first stanza of which is: Hope is the thing with feather that perches in the soul.”
One wonders of the strength which somehow continues to hold the weight of trauma in the very cells of the DNA of the oppressed. As a child I picked hard shelled black walnuts which contained meat hidden in tunnels or veins which had to be patiently mined. When I think of hope in the midst of oppression; lynching, the sexual and soul raping of children and adults, the backbreaking toil until the motor of the body died, the discarding of the shell of the bodies which remained, the abject rejection of the kinship which the spirit gods ordained, I think of those walnuts which held on to their meat determined to only share it with those who were patient enough to extract it.
Hope is the thing with feathers. Feathers are seemingly wispy and yet, capable of shedding water and UV rays, providing warmth, permitting flight of amazing distance and becoming the quills which dictates the words which proclaim “We shall overcome. We shall thrive again. We will not be destroyed.” As does Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son feathers proclaim, “You can’t do nothin except kill me and that ain’t nothin.”
In recent years in the United States and other countries, the feathers of hope carry the courage and strength which is rebuilding Greenwood and other communities; the strong voices which will not be silence in the midst of bills forbidding the teaching of history; bills which ensures the comfort of privileged white boys and girls; the courage and strength which defies the excuses denying the need for reparations; the determination which refuses to be kept from the voting booths; the gift of ‘sight’ which often sees beneath the fear of loving; and the warm breeze which soars in the spite of the cold winds of hate,
One has to have courage and strength to see the feathers which protect the hope, Courage in the face of oppression, smiles in the face of hate, and love in the face of modern lynching. Look carefully. Greenwood Reconciliation Park is the heart where hope is held; the heart of the classroom where teachers respond to questions about history and sex, and where the realities of the fearful stand naked. Look carefully…
Written September 16, 2022
Jimmy F Pickett
coachpickett.org
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